|
|
Paul
Klee/Works and biography
|
|
|
|
Portrait
of Frau P. in the South
1924 |
Magic
Garden
march 1926 |
|
|
|
Paul Klee was born on December 18, 1879, in Münchenbuchsee,
Switzerland, into a family of musicians. His childhood
love of music was always to remain profoundly important
in his life and work. From 1898 to 1901, Klee studied
in Munich, first with Heinrich Knirr, then at the Kunstakademie
under Franz von Stuck. Upon completing his schooling,
he traveled to Italy in the first in a series of trips
abroad that nourished his visual sensibilities. He settled
in Bern in 1902. A series of his satirical etchings
was exhibited at the Munich Secession in 1906. That
same year he moved to Munich, where his work was shown
at Moderne Galerie in 1911.
Klee met Alexej Jawlensky, Vasily Kandinsky, August
Macke, Franz Marc, and other avant-garde figures in
1911; he participated in important shows of advanced
art, including the second Der Blaue Reiter exhibition
in 1912, and the Erste deutsche Herbstsalon in 1913.
In 1912, he visited Paris, where he saw the work of
Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso and met Robert Delaunay.
Klee helped found the Neue Münchner Secession in
1914. Color became central to his art only after a revelatory
trip to Tunisia in 1914.
In 1920, a major Klee retrospective was held at the
Galerie Hans Goltz, Munich; his Schöpferische Konfession
was published; he was also appointed to the faculty
of the Bauhaus. Klee taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar
from 1921 to 1926 and in Dessau from 1926 to 1931. During
his tenure, he was in close contact with other Bauhaus
masters, such as Kandinsky and Lyonel Feininger. In
1924, the Blaue Vier, consisting of Lyonel Feininger,
Jawlensky, Kandinsky, and Klee, was founded. Among his
notable exhibitions of this period were his first in
the United States at the Société Anonyme,
New York, in 1924; his first major show in Paris the
following year at the Galerie Vavin-Raspail; and an
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in
1930. Klee went to Düsseldorf to teach at the Akademie
in 1931, shortly before the Nazis closed the Bauhaus.
Forced by the Nazis to leave his position in Düsseldorf
in 1933, Klee settled in Bern the following year. Major
Klee exhibitions took place in Bern and Basel in 1935
and in Zurich in 1940. Klee died on June 29, 1940, in
Muralto-Locarno, Switzerland.
|
|
|
